What Have I Learned in the First Week of Coding in Python?

I have spent only one week with Python, but I love it. It’s straight forward with a minimum amount of extra syntax, such as semicolons, curly brackets, etc.

By Gulnara Mirzakarimova (Student, Hackbright Academy)

So, what have I learned during the first week? To sum it up – everything you need to know to write a program and we wrote a bunch of small ones. We covered functions, loops, lists, dictionaries, conditionals, logic, test-driven development, version control, debugging. Object oriented stuff spilled over to the beginning of the second week and I will talk about it in the next post.

The first week project was to write a program that creates directories in your computer and moves 200 files in the respective directories based on the letter of the alphabet they start with. The biggest challenge was not to overcomplicate things. I go by this rule: “the code should be straight forward and simple, with as a few cartwheels as possible” – it prevents me from making mistakes that will be hard to debug later.

I know I have spent only one week with Python, but I love it. It’s straight forward with a minimum amount of extra syntax, such as semicolons, curly brackets, etc. It feels so much cleaner compared to Ruby and JS. Now, I cannot give my opinion regarding the conceptual and philosophical aspects of Python and how it relates to other languages. Just give me a few weeks – I am already on it!

About the guest blogger: Gulnara Mirzakarimova is a student at Hackbright Academy learning to be a software developer. They say that most people are either “right-side” brained or “left-side” brained. In my case, Gulnara utilizes both extensively, though her physical balance is out of whack. She recently left her career in finance to become a developer. She is also working on reshaping Washington. D.C. into a vibrant startup playground. One of her initiatives is DC Nightowls, hosting weekly co-working sessions around the city with the main goal to provide space and free WiFi for people to keep working on their startups and projects at night. Follow her on Twitter at @Gulnara.

Women 2.0 readers: How are you learning to program? Is Python your language of choice?